Linda McCarriston

Biography

Linda McCarriston is a Professor Emeritus in the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative
Writing.

Linda McCarriston has received two literature fellowships from the National Endowment
for the Arts, as well as two from the Vermont State Council on the arts. A winner
of the Grolier Prize and the Consuelo Ford Prize from Poetry, she was awarded the
poetry fellowship at the Bunting Institute (now the Radcliffe Institute) at Harvard
for 1992-1993, after which she was named Jenny McKean Moore Visiting Writer in Washington
at the George Washington University. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry,
Poetry Northwest, The Ohio Review, the Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner
( where she has work forthcoming), New England Review (which also solicited her oft-reprinted
essay "The Grace of Form: Class Unconsciousness and an American Writer" for a special
issue on Class and American Writers), ICE-FLOE: An International Journal of Poetry
of the Far North, Calyx, Kalliope, Sojourner, Sojouners, TriQuarterly, Poetry Ireland,
and many others. She has read at Berkeley, Poets' House in NYC, The Library of Congress,
and countless other sites around the country, is a featured poet in Bill Moyers' latest
PBS Poetry Series, The Language of Life (her tape, with Sandra McPherson: "The Field
of Time"), and has been twice interviewed by Terry Gross for Public Radio's Fresh
Air. In addition to poetry readings "on the circuit," she's read and spoken in prisons,
public schools, family shelters, women's centers, and such gatherings as the Alaska
Governor's Summit on the Neglect and Abuse of Children, as well as been invited to
represent the United States and the English Language at the 2004 Festival de las Lenguas,
in Mexico City. One of fourteen poets from the Americas, she was honored for her expression
of solidarity and compassion for Native American women in the poem "Indian Girls,"which
caused great controversy in Alaska. Other poems, including "Le Coursier de Jeanne
D'Arc" and "God the Synecdoche in His Holy Land," have also generated political controversy.
McCarriston has been invited to contribute to panels and speaking series on subjects
including women's history, American education, censorship and self-censorship, and
her poems and prose are anthologized across a wide range of subject areas.

Teaching Responsibilities

I teach writers, not writing. My philosophy for this work draws upon both educational
and literary movements over the last sixty years or so, since I first was a student
(and a writer). I've seen the pendulum swing to its furthest reaches in both directions
at least a couple of times. From this history, I take the best of many traditions
and approaches, applying them to the particular place in which the student writer
locates himself or herself when we begin work.

All learning is authentic and enlivening only to the degree that it actually connects
with living questions and urgencies in the learner. I'm very proud of the successes
of my students who've come through the MFA program at UAA. They have achieved at high
levels nationally in many areas and as a truly individualized talents. My own books
of poems, including a fourth in the making, and a collection of prose essays forthcoming,
document my own development intellectually, politically, artistically over many years.
All of the poets and writers at home in these works are still alive in me and teaching
students at every level and location who need them. Importantly, I do not believe
that "craft" is the whole of writing, nor should it be the whole of teaching writers.
Content itself is a formal element; even the most esoteric poem, if it expects to
have a reader, is a social act. Every academic writer (that's us, earning Master's
Degrees at it) is, know it or not, like it or not, a "literary (or grassroots) intellectual."
Finally, in a globalized era, the United States should not, I think, define the limits
of our models, aspirations, and education.

Linda's "Must Read" list

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

Poems by Emily Dickinson

Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Poems by Thomas McGrath

Poems and Plays by Shakespeare

The Truth of Poetry by Michael Hamburger

Line Break by James Scully

Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison

Freud and the Supression of the Seduction Theory by Masson

Poetry and Alcohol: John Berryman and the Booze Talking by Lewis Hyde

Object Lessons by Eavan Boland

Publications

Her first collection of poems, Talking Soft Dutch, was a 1984 Associated Writing Programs
Award Series selection, and her second, Eva-Mary, winner of the Terrence Des Pres
Prize at Northwestern University, and subsequently short-listed for the National Book
Award in Poetry.

Her third book, Little River, was first published in Ireland (she enjoys joint citizenship).
Presently she is working on a collection of essays and interviews for the University
of Michigan Class:Culture Series, called Class-Colored Glasses, and a fourth collection
of poems. A critical biography of her can be found in Scribner's American Writers,
Supplement XIV, and a literary autobiography in Gale's Contemporary Authors Autobiography
Series,# 28. She lives in Maine, about three hours' drive from her hometown of Lynn,
Massachusetts, with several domesticated animals.

McCarriston has poems forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, and
Seeds of Fire: Poetry from the Other United States, an anthology from Smokestack Press
in England. Class-Colored Glasses, a collection of essays and interviews, is due out
from the University of Michigan Press (its Class:Culture Series) in 2008. Most recently
she has published in David Beispiel's anthology from University of Oregon Press, Long
Journey, been featured on Garrison Keillor's Writers' Almanac and been translated
("Indian Girls") into Spanish on-line.